…Guess I’m contagious it’d be safest if you ran
Fuck that’s what they all just end up doing in the end
Take my car and paint it black
Take my arm, break it in half
Say something, do it soon
It’s too quiet in this room

I need noise
I need the buzz of a sub
Need the crack of a whip
Need some blood in the cut

…I don’t have an agenda
All I do is pretend to be ok so my friends
Can’t see my heart in the blender
Lately, I’ve been killing all my time
Reading through your messages my favorite way to die
Take my head and kick it in
Break some bread for all my sins
Say a word, do it soon
It’s too quiet in this room

I need noise
I need the buzz of a sub
Need the crack of a whip
Need some blood in the cut

“And I don’t want a never-ending life
I just want to be alive while I’m here
And I don’t want a never-ending life
I just want to be alive while I’m here
And I don’t want to see another night
Lost inside a lonely life while I’m here…”

Like this:

Well I know it gets harder every single day
And I know my darkness will never go away

It’s hard when you’re living and you don’t feel much
And you’re down and you’re hoping that things are gonna change

Oh we don’t know the roads that we’re heading down
We don’t know if we’re lost, that we’ll find a way
We don’t know if we leave, will we make it home
We don’t know, there’s hope, then we’ll be okay

And some say it gets brighter
We just have to wait
Mother mother, I can feel your heart break
Burning through me every single day

It’s hard when you’re living and you don’t feel much
And you’re down and you’re hurting ’cause you don’t feel loved
It’s hard when you’re living and you don’t feel much
And you’re down and you’re hoping that things are gonna change

Oh we don’t know the roads that we’re heading down
We don’t know if we’re lost, that we’ll find a way
We don’t know if we leave, will we make it home
We don’t know, there’s hope, then we’ll be okay
Oh there’s something in my mind that’s killing me
There’s something that this life’s not giving me
Would you say

Like this:

As they opened the glass doors etched with the Amtrak police logo the thought passed through my mind in almost too fleeting of a way to even realize it had been there. Like a whisper…grab a gun. How quickly it all would have ended.

But I was almost catatonic. For the past 24 hours I had been living in a state of the deepest depression my emotions had ever delved into. I had not been asleep for well past that amount of time despite being on a regular diet of Tylenol PM every couple of hours. In fact, looking back, I had been operating on roughly six hours of sleep since 3 a.m. on Monday, August 22nd. Six hours in the past 75 with more diphenhydramine in my system than could be anywhere close to healthy.

So surrounded by three officers creating almost a bubble around me, I simply moved within that bubble until coming to the stereotypical hard, plastic, waiting room like chair next to a desk where they asked me to sit down. They put on latex gloves as they obtained my permission to search my bag. My person. I must have given it, though I have no recollection. Maybe I just shook my head. Maybe they simply took my lack of resistance as compliance. Maybe…

For those who have never been there, though I know many of the readers of this will have been, it is almost beyond reach to describe my state at that point. There was no awareness that my plan had been foiled. There was no understanding, or even curiosity of what they were going to do with me next. There was no plotting, calculating, or weighing the gravity of my situation. There. Was. Nothing. Were it not for the beating of my heart and the oxygen flowing in and out of my lungs…I had practically ceased to even exist.

Based on my limited experiences in life, I cannot imagine a person being alive while feeling more dead. To this day I can remember there being three officers. I can picture one. Vaguely a second. No idea what the third looked like. There was an office I was sitting in. No concept of the color of the walls or the placement of objects.

But I do remember this. Two of the officers could not stop talking to me. I believe the third had gone to call my wife. And all the two could say…over, and over, and over, and over, and over again was…“We have all been there.”“There is nothing to be embarrassed of.”“We all know how you feel.” “Everyone has experienced this.”

Really? This? How can you know how I feel when I don’t feel a fucking thing!

It is interesting now as I work through my therapy and recovery to look at some of the most profound underlying challenges in my emotional life. One of, if not the greatest, is a deep-seated, passionate, foundational feeling of anger. Hostility. Rage.

And it is interesting that at this moment of my life when I have never felt less alive, the one emotion that found a way to keep embers alive was that one.